Total bullshit. Delivered with confidence.
Her eyes softened with the weariness of someone underpaid and overworked. She pointed to a dusty corner desk with a half-dead desktop tower humming beside it. “That’s Thompson’s workstation. He’s out sick. You can probably just leave the files there.”
“Perfect,” I said, walking like a man who had absolutely no intention of doing such a thing.
As soon as their attention drifted back to their own misery, I slipped into Thompson’s chair and pulled the flash drive from my pocket.
The USB ports looked like they hadn’t been cleaned since the Bush administration. I shoved the drive in anyway.
Alphabet chimed immediately, sounding like a kid on Christmas morning. “I’m in.”
I watched the screen as windows blinked open—system maps, container logs, assignment rotations. All the port’s digital veins laid bare.
“Good news,” Alphabet murmured. “One of the inbound manifests for today include a flagged container ID we got from Ignacio. There’s definitely a trail here.”
My stomach tightened. “Where?”
“Pier C.”
Of course.
I flicked my eyes to the glass wall. Through it, I could see across the yard—cranes, trucks, and the layered steel labyrinth of containers. Somewhere in that grid was a path Sarmiento had walked.
The woman refilling her coffee glanced over. “Everything alright?”
I needed to redirect attention. Fast.
So I did the only thing that came naturally to me when under pressure?—
I opened one of Thompson’s media folders and double-clicked the first file I saw.
And immediately regretted it.
An audio file blasted from the speakers—obnoxiously loud, tinny, and unmistakably…
“Oh my god,” the female operator choked.
The male operator turned around so fast he hit the vending machine.
Alphabet sputtered in my ear. “Voodoo—what the—what is that?”
Whatthatwas…
Was a heavily auto-tuned, off-key recording of someone screaming the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a falsetto that could legally be classified as a weapon.
I slapped the volume down, but the damage was done.
Both operators were staring at me like I’d just confessed to murder.
I cleared my throat. “Thompson’s… uh… side project. Didn’t expect that.”
The woman snorted. The man cackled. “Dude, Thompson’s gonna die when I tell him we finally found his karaoke folder.”
Their attention drifted again, amused now instead of suspicious.
Good. Humiliation successful.
“Alphabet,” I whispered. “You got what you need?”
